Chris Lightfoot
Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 — 11 February 2007) was an English scientist and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at e-democracy charity mySociety.[1]
Family and early life
He was born in Dulwich, England, in 1978.[1] His mother, Prue, was a journalist and his father, Robert, was a patent agent.[1] His older sister Steph taught him how to program the family's BBC Micro.[1] He used this knowledge of programming to produce a crater investigation model in the physics department at Westminster which was of an extremely high standard. This was part of a physics project in which he was awarded a 15 Merit — an outstanding and very rare full mark.
He attended Westminster School, where he was part of the team representing the school in the British Informatics Olympiad.[1] He began his undergraduate studies at Clare College, Cambridge focusing on Physics while studying a Natural Science Tripos.[1] He graduated with a Master's degree in 2000.[1]
Chris was one of the founders of Mythic Beasts, an ISP.[1]
Death
He had suffered from depression throughout his adult life.[1] Lightfoot committed suicide on 11 February 2007.[1][2]
Contributions to Internet
He played an important role in the development of:
- PledgeBank, which addresses the prisoner's dilemma for all sorts of social-good projects;
- YourHistoryHere.com — a site where people can annotate a map with their knowledge of the history of that place.
- Placeopedia — an online gazetteer that is a mashup of Google Maps and the English Wikipedia.
- TheyWorkForYou — tracks speeches and activities of Members of Parliament, including presenting an accessible version of Hansard
- WriteToThem.com — facilitates contacting elected representatives at all levels of UK government.
- HearFromYourMP.com — a site encouraging MPs to email their constituents.
- hassleme.co.uk [3]— "Because your mother can't remind you of everything."
- DowningStreetSays.com — searchable text of the Prime Minister's Spokesman's briefings.
- Downing Street e-Petitions — a petitions website for 10 Downing Street.
- FixMyStreet — another map-based application facilitating citizens informing their local authority of problems needing their attention, such as broken streetlamps etc.
- tpop3d — a pop3 server
- vmail-sql — vmail-sql, a virtual email hosting system backed by MySQL
- Political Survey and — An attempt to generate a multi-axis political model based solely on principal components analysis of survey results, rather than preconceived axes.[4]
- WhatDoTheyKnow is dedicated to Chris, who thought up the idea of automatically republishing email responses [5]
- Mythic beasts (ISP), co-founder of the Cambridge based hosting ISP.
- He also did additional coding on the video game LittleBigPlanet, which was released a year after his death. The game was dedicated to his memory.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j The Times obituary (subscription required)
- ^ Obituary on the blog of friend and colleague Francis Irving
- ^ Lassally, Romi. "Hassle Me: Nagging 2.0" Huffington Post
- ^ Connor, Alan. The new left and right? "BBC News"
- ^ http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/credits